By Teaching Others, Are WE Creating TOO MANY Artists?
I AM often asked these questions:
1) Are you worried that you are helping too many artists – that will one day take away your business?
2) Why would you help other people learn and succeed with their art when they will ultimately compete with you and yours in the market place?
3) Aren’t you worried that you will have a bunch of artists copying your style?
Abundance versus Scarcity, A Way of Thinking
I Copied This for School
I was happy to finally be able to make this video to explain my position on the abundance mentality vs the scarcity mentality. I would love to know how you feel?
Won’t your students take away YOUR business?
Will the copy cats out there, copy YOUR style and steel all your would be work? Absolutely not, your style is like a fingerprint. Only you can produce it. And I can’t think of anyone who has really gotten anywhere just by completely copying someone else’s style. Many have found their niche or their style by copying that of another or a lot of others. I say that is a good thing.
I will also say that if you have a unique style, like Will’s unique acrylic painting style, and as a lot of leaders and great artists do, and as a lot of unknowns also have, people will copy, and why shouldn’t they? Suppose it is such a cool style, You have mastered, that others start to mimic it or copy it. Good for you, that means something. And what about the market place. As that style becomes popular, there will be more demand for YOUR style of work. And the market is so big that it won’t hurt at all to have others doing similar work.
We talked to a young artist who has a neat and unique style of painting. We invited her to teach an online art course for Folio Academy. She wouldn’t do it because she was afraid that all of you would hurry up and copy her “style” and put her out of business. I believe that IF hundreds of artists, in fact thousands, learned her style and copied her and promoted their work, she would only do better. First of all few if any would nail “her style” and as more and more artists painted like her, that “style” if it is SO good, would become popular and more clients would want it. Creating a much bigger market then she alone could ever fill.
Art Schools MAKE their students “COPY” others.
copy of the Death Dealer
Most art schools will have a few assignments where you are to do just that. Copy a masters art work, or that of someone you idolize. I copied a piece by Franz Halls and a piece by my favorite fantasy fiction artist, Frank Frazetta. I learned a lot from it. If you know your history you’ll know that Franz Halls was already dead and I didn’t put Frank Frazetta out of business at all. I probably didn’t promote him much either with my insignificant attempt to mimic his “style”.
Author’s note. I was so proud of how I took the word Forgery, and made it look like Frazetta’s own signature.
I have seen people sitting in front of great paintings like the Mona Lisa, right there in the Louvre, copying the daylights out of these paintings. I haven’t seen any one mistaken for Leonardo Da Vinci lately. Copy away. Okay, enough of the soap box. Wait, one more thing, Bob Ross was never replaced and all he did was teach “His Style and Techniques”. I’m just sayin.